Any Good
by wth18
Summary: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For Trance and Harper, a desperate act of love leads to tragedy.
1. Chapter 1

TITLE: Any Good

AUTHOR: hannahthewriter

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Andromeda or any of the characters in it. Unfortunately

ARCHIVE: Ask first

RATING: PG-13

SETTING/SEASON: S2, After 'All Too Human'

SPOILERS: Yes. If you don't yet know and don't want to know what Trance is, don't read

PAIRING(S): Trance/Harper

SUMMARY: An act of desperation and love has terrible consequences

A/N: May at some point get interrupted by my exams.

**Chapter 1**

"_Admirer as I think I am  
Of stars that do not give a damn,  
I cannot, now I see them, say  
__I missed one terribly all day."_

* * *

'Trashed.' 

Beka studied the inside of her ship with disgust. It had looked bad from the outside but she'd had no idea just how far the damage had gone. Water dripped from everything, trickling down the walls and somehow hanging in the air as well. On top of this, the entire ship was dead, and a lot of the parts could not just be fixed – they had to be replaced. A few things had thankfully been spared; her music collection had been in a watertight storage compartment, as had most of her other belongings. But just about everything else was a mess.

'On the bright side, at least Tyr, Rev and Harper are still alive,' Dylan said optimistically.

'Not for long,' Beka growled. 'When I get my hands on them they'll wish they'd drowned. This is the last time I let someone else fly my ship.'

'OK, OK, you can kill them all if you like, but how about letting them redeem themselves a little first by helping to get the parts. And you'll need Harper to fix it up. And Tyr to remind Harper to carry on fixing it up every time he wanders off to do something else.'

Dylan knew (hoped) that Beka was only joking, however angry she might seem. The look on her face when he had told her they would have to leave them had told him that, probably for the first time, Beka cared more about the people on the Maru than she cared for the ship itself. And none of them had emerged unscathed. Rev had stayed in his quarters since they'd got back, shivering and weak. Even for a Magog the journey to the surface had been hard. Tyr and Harper were still on the Med. deck. Trance had managed to bring Harper out of his coma, but Tyr was still in a fairly bad shape and, despite his protests, had not been allowed to leave his bed.

'OK, so where's the nearest drift where we can pick up parts?' Beka asked with a heavy sigh.

'Actually, from what Andromeda's told me, it would make more sense to pick up parts from Sessharim. That's a nearby planet. The people are mostly pacifists and there's very little conflict anywhere on the planet.'

Beka groaned. 'Since when is going to a planet a good idea? Whenever we go to planet we get into trouble.'

'Whenever we go _anywhere_ we get into trouble,' Dylan reminded her. 'And you can have command of the Andromeda while we go to pick up spare parts.'

'We? Who's we?'

'Well I think we'll leave Tyr here. He's not fully recovered yet, and Tyr and pacifists don't mix. But I think Trance would get on well with them, maybe even get us a good price on those parts. And Harper will know what parts to get and he'll be able to tell how good they are.'

He watched her carefully to judge her reaction. She was still looking around at her wreck of a ship. She reached out and gently touched a console. It fizzed, sparked and went completely dead. The blonde captain glared at it.

'OK,' she said at last, and Dylan breathed a silent sigh of relief. In truth he was terrified of Beka in a bad mood. 'How will you get to the surface? You can't exactly take the Maru.' As if you to prove it the ship shifted and groaned like an old woman with arthritis.

'We'll each take a slipfighter.'

* * *

'A _slipfighter!_' 

_Well, someone's feeling better,_ Dylan thought wearily as the blonde engineer ran around the small craft, practically drooling. Harper had never flown a slipfighter before. Correction, Harper had never been _allowed_ to fly a slipfighter before. But he swore he would know how to fly one, since the controls were pretty basic.

'Harper … Harper, you're making me dizzy.' Dylan grabbed his engineer by the scruff of the neck, forcing him to stop. 'Now remember, we're just taking these down to the surface and then back here. No racing it, no trying to do tricks, no modifying it so it will go faster. Basically, don't do anything that you would usually do.'

Harper saluted. 'Yes, Mom,' he said solemnly. Then he ran off again, but this time towards the interior hangar doors. Dylan watched him go, a little more concerned than he had been before.

Outside in the corridor, Harper ran straight into Trance, who was running in the opposite direction. Ran into her _literally_. The two of the ended up tangled in a heap on the floor.

'Geez, Trance, you call yourself a psychic? Shouldn't you have known I was going to be there?' he complained.

'I don't call myself a psychic,' the purple girl protested as she picked herself up.

'Good job too, otherwise I'd sue you for false advertising.' Then he remembered why he had been running in the first place. He grabbed her arms excitedly. 'Trance! Dylan's letting me go down to that planet! In a slipfighter!'

Trance grinned. 'Yes, isn't it exciting? He's letting me fly one too!'

'Dylan's giving you a slipfighter too? Does he just not like those things?'

'Who cares? We're getting slipfighters!'

The two of them hugged and started jumping around and laughing like small children. Dylan stepped out of the hangar deck and watched them warily.

'Oh boy, here come those second thoughts,' he groaned. This was followed by apologies and objections from Trance and Harper, who ran after him, promising to be careful, to not do anything stupid, and in general be the best slipfighter pilots in the galaxy, nay, the _universe_.

'Besides,' Harper whined. 'If you leave me here it'll mean me being left alone with Beka and Tyr and they both hate me right now so I think it's only right that I give them a little space.' He suddenly winced. Maybe from the thought of what the two of them could do to him, most probably because of the larvae.

'Harper,' Trance said gently. 'Your medicine-'

'I've taken it,' he said a little too quickly.

'When?'

He paused. 'Yesterday. Yeah, I know, three times a day, it's just that last time I-'

'Last time you overdosed,' Trance scolded him. 'And underdosing can be just as dangerous.' She folded her arms and looked at him pointedly until he gave in and inhaled the leukoprene.

* * *

Trance buckled herself into her slipfighter and grabbed onto the controls, excited and impatient despite herself. 'Can we go yet?' she pestered. 

'Opening hangar doors,' Andromeda said, and for a second she almost sounded amused.

The three slipfighters exited the Andromeda. Harper broke his promise to Dylan immediately by performing a not-very-elegant corkscrew and then spiralling up and away from the other two before doing a 180 degree turn and rejoining them.

'Harper!' Dylan yelled furiously over the comms.

'I know, I know, careful!' the engineer replied in a bored voice. 'C'mon, Dylan, when am I going to get this opportunity again?'

'Never if you carry on like that!'

'I'm doing fine. And this baby flies beautifully, thanks mostly to my own technical genius. You there, Trance?'

'I'm reading you, over,' she replied giddily.

'Race you to the surface?'

'Harper, I said no!' Dylan yelled furiously.

The engineer grumbled but obeyed. Dylan watched the other two slipfighters as they headed for Sessharim. Each of the crewmembers had a different piloting style. Tyr had a tendency to fly straight, without trying anything showy, more like a bulldozer than anything else. Beka was … well, Beka was the best pilot in the universe. She was very bold, often flying at reckless speeds, but she was always in total control. Harper was very bold too, but boldness was rashness in Harper's hands, since he did not have Beka's skill. Trance's slipfighter fluttered in space like a butterfly, sometimes darting forward and then slowing right down as if she were uncertain. Dylan couldn't help but feel that this was all a show – Trance was never uncertain. He had never seen Rev fly, but he felt that the Magog would probably fly similarly to the way that Dylan himself flew – brave but careful and cautious.

They grew close to the planet's atmosphere and Harper forgot Dylan's orders and sped up, laughing insanely as he made his slipfighter turn over and over in mid-air.

'Harper, behave! I'm transmitting the co-ordinates for the landing site now.' Dylan waited for a reply. The reply did not come. 'Harper? Trance, can you reach him?'

'No, Dylan. I think he maybe turned his comms off.'

'Idiot!' Dylan yelled, exasperated. 'He's going too fast! He can't enter to atmosphere at that speed; the turbulence will rip him apart!' He could only watch helplessly as Harper sped on, oblivious to the danger.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

"_Who's that talking?_

_Death the Revelator._

_Who's that talking?_

_Death the Revelator._

_Who's that talking?_

_Death the Revelator_

_In the book of the Seventh Seal."

* * *

_

Harper laughed and cheered. He felt like there was fire in his veins instead of blood. His heart was pounding like a rabbit's. He dipped into the stratosphere, watching sparks flying off of his slipfighter. He had grown tired of having Dylan shouting at him and turned his comms system off. Yet his good mood died away as the cockpit began to shake.

'Damn, he muttered. He was gong to fast. He quickly pulled out of the stratosphere, but the simple movement meant that he was now speeding away from Trance and Dylan. He didn't even know where he was supposed to be landing. 'Damn, damn, damn. Co-ordinates…' He looked down at his console but there were still no co-ordinates there. Quickly, he turned his comms system back on.

'Dylan, I uh…'

'Harper, look out!' Trance screamed.

'Huh?' Harper looked up just as a massive hunk of space-rock slammed into his slipfighter. He spun off at a crazy angle that hurtled him into the planet's atmosphere. The cockpit shook crazily, and if he hadn't been strapped in he would have been smeared all over the inside of the slipfighter. Harper grabbed the controls and tried to bring the craft back under his control.

Beka appeared on one of his screens. She must have been following his 'progress'. 'Harper, what are you doing? Why can't you fly like a sane person?' she snapped, but there was fear in her voice.

'Uh…' Harper looked over the other display screens and tried to register what they were telling him. He looked out and saw that he was passing over water, heading towards what looked like an expanse of green. As he got closer he realised that it was a forest. The water passed away beneath him as he wrestled with the controls, trying to slow himself down. He knew it wasn't working. He felt a stab of pain in his stomach, as if the creatures inside him had also sensed that something was wrong. 'It's OK, kids,' he lied through gritted teeth. 'Daddy's just having a tough day at work.'

'Harper?' Beka said in a puzzled voice.

'Yeah?'

'What is your location and status?'

'Um…' He checked the readings on the various consoles. 'Location is shit creek. Status … missing a paddle.'

'Oh, that's real helpful.'

He managed to slow his craft down a little but it was too little too late. The ground grew closer. Then suddenly the topmost leaves of the tallest trees were whipping at the plexiglass screen in front of him, which had a long crack down it from the impact of the hunk of space rock.

'Beka,' he said quickly. 'You know how you made me promise I wouldn't die without saying goodbye to you first.'

'Harper, no…'

'Bye, boss.'

Crunch.

* * *

Light. Pain. The slime of blood on his forehead and hands.

The first thing he did was try to move his arms and legs. His toes wriggled. His fingers curled into a fist. Good, he wasn't paralyzed. His left knee spiked with pain whenever he moved it, though.

He was propped up against a tree. This was strange in itself. Where was his slipfighter? He looked around.

'Oh, crap.'

The craft was a wreck. The plexiglass screen was missing, but he could see splashes of red on the few shards remaining. That must be his blood. He could see small fires burning within the cockpit. He could hear the crackle of static over what was left of the comms. OK, so his craft was a corpse. Now he had to look at himself.

It wasn't pretty. Through a tear in the material of his pants he could see the huge, ugly bruise on his kneecap. There was also a burn high on his right thigh, and another on his hand. The same hand was missing the index finger from the first knuckle upwards. A wide cut marred his forehead. His face, back and arms were covered in tiny cuts from the broken plexiglass. He could fell another nasty bruise on his back where he'd hit the tree.

And there was something else. Something that he couldn't quite put his finger on (ha!). He stood up and found the motion to be slow and difficult. Clutching his bad hand to his chest, he used the other to inspect himself.

Ah, there it was.

A small metal shard from the slipfighter was sticking out of his stomach. Natural painkillers meant that he hadn't felt it at first, but he felt sure that he would start to feel it very soon. He tested it with his fingers and hissed in a sharp breath. Deep. It had probably barely grazed his internal organs but it was deep nonetheless. Probably not wise to remove it just yet. It would be better to ask Trance to take a look at it.

Trance.

'Oh boy.'

He limped forward a couple of steps and looked around. He was definitely in a forest, and he couldn't see any signs of civilisation. However, in this state that didn't mean much. He might only be a mile or so from a settlement. He looked around and saw a small, furry quadruped with a stubby tail peering at him cautiously from behind a tree. He hissed at it and it ran away, squealing like a pig.

He headed over to the remains of his slipfighter, and used the small manual fire extinguisher to put out the fires. Since the first-aid kit had been melted in one of the fires, he tore strips of material from the pilot's seat and tied them around his hand and the stump of his finger. He used another strip to bind up the cut on his forehead. He walked around the cargo bay and found his luggage. Since they'd planned to stay on the planet for a few days he'd brought a few changes of clothes. He pulled out a T-shirt and pressed it to his stomach wound, binding it there with a belt. It meant that the shard of metal was pressed into his gut but at least it slowed the bleeding a little. There, immediate problems were taken care of.

The trouble was that he was on a planet. And planets were really, really big. If he somehow managed to pull himself together enough to scramble up a tree he would be able to see two, maybe three miles if he was lucky. About as far as he could walk. And this planet was probably about millions of square miles in surface area. Dylan and Trance could be in any one of those square miles. He had flown off course and away from them before he had landed, but not too far. So, if he was very lucky, they would probably only be in the next country. A few thousand miles away.

'Harper!'

_On the other hand…_

A pretty purple girl came running towards him and threw her arms around him. Harper muffled a cry of pain and hugged her gently back, smearing blood on her colourful jumpsuit.

'I thought you were dead!' she cried.

'Me? SuperHarper? Man of Steel? Not a chance.'

He held him at arm's length and looked at him. 'You're a mess!' she said, sounding shocked.

Harper rolled his eyes. 'Trance, I just crash-landed a slipfighter.'

'Yes, but still…' Her roving eyes found his hand with the missing finger. 'Ew!' She touched the material carefully.

'Reckon it's the universe's way of telling me it's rude to point?'

'We can probably get you a transplant once we get to a hospital. There's a settlement about five miles from here. I came after you when I saw you were about to crash. Dylan's at the landing site.'

'Which is?'

'In Ga'aul.'

'Which is?'

'The capital city of Arand'es.'

'Which is how far from here?'

'Three thousand miles.'

'Fantastic. Where's your slipfighter?'

'In a clearing near here. But it won't fly. I had kind of a rough landing myself,' she said with a sheepish grin.

'Is your first aid kit still intact?' he asked as a fresh wave of pain swept through his abdomen.

'Yes.'

'Good.' He lifted up his shirt and showed her the wound with its makeshift bandage. She gently undid the belt and pulled the T-shirt away as slowly as she could. Dried blood had stuck it to the wound and Harper winced as it tore away from the skin. Once it was gone, fresh blood spewed over his stomach, seeping into his pants. He tried not to scream as Trance poked at the wound.

'It's deep,' she muttered. 'I'm going to need bandage this properly before we go too far.'

'You think it's damaged anything important?'

She gently pushed her fingers inside. 'No. But it may be pressed up against some of your internal organs, so we don't want it going any deeper.'

'All that medical training just to work out that it might not be a good idea to push the bit of shrapnel in deeper?' Harper commented, a little more roughly than he had intended.

She replaced the T-shirt and told him to hold it there. Then she lifted his arm over her shoulder and supported him so that he wouldn't put too much pressure on his bad knee. The two of them made their way slowly to Trance's slipfighter. Harper raised an eyebrow when he saw it. It wasn't as bad as his own but it was still in a pretty bad way. And yet Trance didn't seem to have a scratch on her.

She lay him down, grabbed the first aid kit and went to work on him. Nanobots took care of his knee, the cut on his forehead and the smaller cuts. She took off his shirt, rolled up the legs of his pants and washed off as much of the blood as she could. After cleaning up the stump of his finger she put another bandage on it to stop the bleeding. With a sponge she gently cleaned his stomach wound, but blood continued ooze from it. After inspecting it once again she explained that she couldn't pull the shrapnel out without the proper equipment, since he might bleed to death.

'Mmmff mmmbb,' Harper replied. He had a piece of leather crammed into his mouth and he bit down on it every time the pain grew too much to bear. Trance refused to give him painkillers because she was worried about concussion and she didn't want to put him to sleep. She bandaged the wound again, and hastily packed some supplies while he put his shirt and boots back on. Then the two of them set off for the village.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

"_The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; _

_Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; _

_Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood, _

_For nothing now can ever come to any good."

* * *

_

'Trance will find him,' Dylan told himself. 'Trance will take care of him.'

And yet he couldn't help but feel guilty as he paced the comfortable hotel room, wondering where his two friends were. He had arrived in Ga'aul a couple of hours ago, and had immediately asked Andromeda to find Harper's last known location. He had then passed this information onto the authorities of that area, who had calmly told him that they would send a search party. But where? Andromeda had managed to narrow Harper's location down, but he could still be anywhere in an area of about two hundred miles.

'Dylan,' Beka said over the communication centre at the desk. 'You've done all you can.'

'I should have gone after him,' the captain said, shaking his head.

'Trance will take care of him,' Beka said, but she didn't sound completely convinced. 'Look, there's nothing more that you can do right now. Why don't you start picking up the spare parts for the Maru? We'll let you know right away if they find Trance and Harper.'

'I guess you're right. Dylan out.'

How could he concentrate on bargaining when his friends were lost and possibly badly inured, or worse. And yet he had to. He was a High Guard Commander. He had to be strong, even in the face of this. And Trance and Harper had got themselves out of worse scrapes before. They would be OK.

* * *

'…But I've got to disagree with Kurt there. I mean, with the lights out it's _more_ dangerous. You get knees and elbows going everywhere and you can sometimes get serious injuries, like this one time when I…' Harper caught Trance's pained expression. 'Too much information?'

'A little,' she admitted.

'Sorry.'

Trance looked wistfully around her. 'This planet is so beautiful. Look at those flowers! I've never seen anything like them before.'

'Yeah. If the flowers look like that, I wonder what the women are like.'

'Seamus Harper, you have a one-track mind,' she scolded. She noticed that she was talking to thin air. Harper had stopped walking. She looked behind and saw him sitting on a rock, holding his stomach with a pained expression. She walked over to him.

'Shrapnel?' she asked sympathetically.

He shook his head. 'Magog.'

'Oh.' She suddenly noticed that his inhaler was missing. 'Harper! Where's your inhaler?'

'I lost it in the crash.'

'When did you last…'

'Only a few hours ago, just before the crash. They were playing up so I put them to sleep.'

'Then they should still be asleep. They haven't started to fight it yet.'

'They're fighting me, though. Can we rest here for a while?'

'Sure.'

They still had a few miles to go before they reached the settlement. Trance pulled a bottle of water and some food from her pack and handed them to her friend. He took a long drink but didn't touch the food.

'Harper, you must eat! To keep your strength up.'

'Trust me, babe, anything I eat will just come right back up. My guts aren't too stable right now.'

She looked at him worriedly. He was white as a sheet, and when she lifted up his shirt she saw that blood had seeped through the bandage.

'How far do we have to go?' he asked. Sweat was beading on his pale forehead.

'Nearly three miles,' Trance replied softly. 'Shall we start walking again?'

'Yeah.'

He stood up, but he was swaying a little, and he walked slowly and carefully. They had barely gone another half a mile before he simply collapsed against a tree, slid to the ground and sat there, eyes closed.

'Harper!'

His teeth were gritted against the pain. 'Trance, it hurts.'

She shook her head. 'I don't understand! The metal didn't pierce any internal organs, and your larvae should still be dormant!'

She lay him down on the ground and pulled his shirt up. Sure enough, she could see the larvae moving beneath the taut skin of his stomach. She had never seen them that active. More blood seeped from the wound. As she wiped it away, her furiously working mind produced an answer. The shrapnel wound and the larvae. On their own, neither could explain this. But put them together…

'What are you guys doing down there?' he muttered irritably.

'Harper, do you remember what I told you when you first woke up with the larvae.'

He winced. 'You told me it was OK. Is it OK now? Yay. Let's go home now.'

'No, Harper. I told you why I couldn't take them out. Do you remember? I told you … I told you that if they felt threatened they would … attack the host. They would … start to feed.'

Harper closed his eyes. 'Do they want ketchup with that?'

She glared at him. 'How can you make jokes at a time like this?'

'Why, will being serious make it all better?'

She looked down at his stomach and gasped as she saw angry purple blossom across his stomach. Internal bleeding. It was followed by a cry of pain from Harper, and she quickly reached out and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back with as much strength as he could muster.

'Ow,' he muttered quietly with tears in his eyes.

'Oh, Harper…' Trance said helplessly.

'So, I'm dying, huh? That sucks.'

'You're not dying.'

'You're a terrible liar. Hey, remember we promised each other that whichever one of us died first would come back and tell the other one what to wear. I mean, if the afterlife is full of people in dinner jackets you'd be pretty embarrassed if you showed up wearing your day clothes. Looks like I'm … gonna be giving you … fashion tips … ow.' He shuddered from the pain.

'I'll get help. It isn't too far to the settlement.'

'Trance, you can't … _ah crap get your stinking teeth off my liver, you asshole!_'

'Harper!'

'Don't worry, babe, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to Turdbrain. He's really … going wild in there…' Harper cried out again, clutching at his stomach. Trance slipped her hand under his back and pulled him closer. He looked up at her, the light in his eyes dying.

Trance's mind was racing. She had never in her life been this panicked. This was, after all, only a human. Just a human. Her people destroyed whole worlds full of these simply because they had nothing better to do. Personally, she liked humans. In fact, humans were probably her favourite species in the whole universe, which is why she had chosen to look and act like one. But at the same time this wasn't just a human. This was Harper.

Harper's vision started to dim. In front of him was a blur of purple. From his chest down there was just white-hot pain. He couldn't even identify exactly where it was any more. It felt like a bunch of baby Magog were trying to eat his guts, which was hardly surprising. Trance. Poor Trance. She had to watch him die. He squeezed her hand as tightly as he could. At least he wasn't alone.

_Tell her,_ his mind whispered. _Tell her now, while there's still time. Tell her you love her._

He opened his mouth to obey, but at that moment one of the larvae decided, on the spur of the moment, to tear a hole in one of his lungs, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood.

Harper was dying in her arms.

She told herself that there was nothing that she could do to help him now, and because she had always been good at lying she almost believed herself. Ignoring the nagging thought at the back of her mind, she tried to distance herself from the man in her arms. She reminded herself that this was, after all, only a human. He may be a talented engineer, a genius even, but compared to the things she had seen he was really nothing special. Just another human.

He coughed raggedly. Blood foamed at his lips and trickled down his chin.

Of course, there was one way that she could save him. One single, glittering molecule in an ocean of futures without Harper. She tried to turn away from it. There were very few things that she was forbidden to do, fewer still that were expressly forbidden. But to do this was unthinkable. Impossible.

Harper was dying in her arms.

A teardrop fell from her cheek and onto his, but she doubted if he even felt it. She reminded herself of who she was, and told herself that the pain of losing him would not last forever. It would barely last for a second in the enormous span of her lifetime. It was unfortunate that he would not live to build the tesseract machine which would have saved him, but there was nothing she could do, without breaking the laws that held the fabric of the universe. And even if she did, the risks were far too great. Most probably it would end with both of them wishing that she had just let him go.

_Harper_ was _dying._

The young earther could feel the pain starting to leak away. There was still the dull ache in his body that told him he no longer had any oxygen to keep him alive. Trance's face blurred in front of him and he held her gaze for another second before closing his eyes. He was barely conscious, but he was awake enough to feel Magog teeth burrowing further up inside him, and the moment of icy pain as one of the larvae began ferociously attacking his heart.

Trance saw that he only had a few seconds left to live. She closed her eyes. 'Forgive me,' she whispered.

She plunged her hands into his chest and a strange golden light filled the clearing, shining off the leaves. She closed her hands around what was left of his heart and let instinct take over.


End file.
